Virtual Studio Technology (VST) plugins are what amateur and professional recording engineers and artists use to enhance their audio projects. A plugin is a type of software that works inside another piece of software. Instead of working on its own, you plug it into something else (in our case, the DAW).
If you’ve ever visited a recording studio, you’ve certainly noticed some racks containing objects called effects: they’re the equipment that allows the sound engineer to add details to the instruments, maybe some reverb, an echo, a compressor or a special effect. For a guitarist these are the studio equivalent of the numerous pedals at his feet, and the studio ones are much more refined, precise and expensive.
The chain of effects can actually characterize the sound of an instrument in an important way, the famous case being the sound of the solos of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Two notes are enough and you recognize it. Or Jimi Hendrix’s Wha Wha, and many other famous examples (and we are talking about just ONE effect).
One of the most famous effects used by Gilmour is a delay called the Binson Echorec, a tape echo from days gone by.
– (left) David tweaking his Binson II unit during A Saucerful of Secrets filmed at Pompeii. (right) David pictured at Earl’s Court, London, UK in May 1973 with a Binsin II and a Binson PE.
That distinctive sound is so desired that many software houses has seen fit to create a replica of the delay in digital format, emulating not only the sound but also the look in the interface.
This delay is just an example, you can find any kind of known and unknown effects, free and paid, in every category and often it will be just how you use effects that will shape your personal sound.
Your DAW’s mixer will allow you to use them freely, even emulating rather refined techniques such as sidechain and parallel compression.
The world of effects is a complex world, just as important as that of tools. Below is a probably partial list of the available audio effects organized by categories.
Now that we have bought an audio interface, we need to think about the tape recorder, mixer, effects, anything required in a studio.
In a digital studio, the reel to reel recorder is part of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).
The digital audio workstation (DAW) has become the music producer’s canvas, a central software platform containing all the sounds, instruments, and tools they use for recording music (and other).
DAWs are deep, complex programs with lots to learn. Choosing a DAW is one of the biggest early decisions a producer faces. But what is a digital audio workstation exactly, what can you do with them, and which one is a best fit for your own ideas and interests?
Think of a DAW as a digital representation of a physical recording studio where you can produce audio for a wide variety of mediums including film, gaming, podcasting, music, UX, and more. The whole studio process is packed into one, the creative ideas in tandem with the technical. You can record tracks, build up beats, add instruments or vocal parts, then lay out the arrangement, apply effects, and mix the finished work all within one interconnected hub.
Today, the convenience and accessibility of DAWs have made them the most popular way of making music and editing audio — used by everyone from bedroom producers and songwriters all the way up to top industry professionals.
There’s a range of DAWs available that we will explore in more detail below, each with unique features and advantages. That said, common standards of design and compatibility can be identified across the different brands. Personally i use as DAW Presonus Studio One and Reaper, but it’s just because in my opinion they have the best workflow for me, the one that facilitates my personal way of working.
But all DAWs have points in common, find the one that best suits your personal preferences. If someone tells you “this sounds better than that,” doubt it. A DAW doesn’t have to “sound better” but allow you to manage the way you work most effectively without hindering your creativity.
We’re talking bits, they can’t sound better in one DAW than another. If they feel like they do, there’s something wrong with either your setup or DAW. There are lots of both free and paid ones. Find yours and learn to use it well, even reading the fucking manual. The DAW is the most important tool in your creative arsenal.
What can you do with a DAW?
1. Record, play and edit audiotracks
Digital audio workstations come with built-in viewport that allow you to record, save, edit, and playback audio. To record audio from external instruments or microphones, you need an audio interface. An audio interface takes audio signals and converts them into data that a computer can process, allowing you to record and edit audio in software based environments like a DAW.
An audio track in your DAW (in this case in Studio One, but is the same in any DAW)
Once you record, all audio is saved and displayed on the timeline, where you can cut, copy, and paste audio waveforms. From the sequencer window, you can easily mute waveforms, stitch them together, and crossfade them into one another, much like you would with audio recorded on physical tape.
2. Record, play and edit MIDI virtual instrumentstracks
DAWs also allow you to play virtual instruments (VST) for composing music. Virtual instruments and effects are software programs designed to replicate the sounds of physical instruments like synthesizers, pianos, drums, guitars, violins, trumpets, and more, or create completely new digital instruments for which there is no analog reference.
Most DAWs come with stock libraries of sounds, but they also allow for third party plug-ins—external software that can be “plugged in” to a DAW to enhance its functionality. In general, each VST has an installer that copies the needed files in the right place, a location predefined by Steinberg, the inventor of VST technology. However, many free plugins don’t have an installer, so you’ll need to place the necessary files in the correct folder by yourself.
Also check that the VST plugin is consistent with your DAW, a 64 bit DAW wants 64 bit VSTs, or it won’t work.
As you can easily imagine, a track in which the events you play or the settings of an audio effect are recorded is not equivalent to an audio track: another very important technology comes into play: MIDI.
Yes, your DAW can record two types of events: audio, such as from a microphone or guitar plugged into your sound card input, or digital in a format called MIDI. Midi tracks don’t contain audio, but a list of events such as how you pressed the A key for 1 second and with what intensity, and a series of other performance-related events. A example in the following table:
Before MIDI Learn, there were MIDI implementation charts only. This table shows how the Korg Volca Drum responds to various MIDI messages. The Control Change section in the middle lists the MIDI CC numbers and the parameters they correspond to. If you wanted to control the pitch of oscillator 1 from an external MIDI controller, for example, you’d set one of its encoders to output MIDI CC 26.
Don’t be scared, there’s no need to handwrite these codes. Your MIDI keyboard (you have one, don’t you?) will send the DAW everything needed to write your performance, just like when you use your PC keyboard to write text.
The enormous advantage is that, just like in a word processor, it will then be very easy to correct any errors, modify the execution, align the MIDI messages in a grid, manipulate the intensity of a note, in short, everything you possibly want to modify in your MIDI track. This track will faithfully send all the necessary MIDI messages to the virtual synth VST, which will play it using the sound you have chosen (any sound included in the library of the VST) and on the dedicated MIDI channel. All this events are recorded in the piano roll, vhere you can edit each note in very simple manner.
MIDI is so popular and flexible that you can find a lot of songs on MIDI format in many sites, where you can download a song and then import the file in your DAW, where you can manipulate sounds for better results for make the better cover never seen..
Midi events in piano roll view, the area dedicated to MIDI in any DAW. Any event can be edited yout editing the notes on piano roll. Very easy!
Sounds complicated but it’s not, just imagine a midi track as if it were text in your favorite word processor, and being able to edit each note as you would in the word processor.
If these concepts are difficult for you to understand, I recommend watching this video. It’s based on Studio One, a commercial DAW, but the concepts apply to any DAW.
Your DAW is not “only” a recorder, it also has a mixer to mix your sounds as you wish and VST plugins are not only instruments, but also sound effects of all kinds that you can apply to your tracks.
Mixer console in Studio One Each slider represent a track.
All this can be managed to get your final master in the preferred audio format and resolution.
There would still be a million things to say, and we’ll do it in dedicated posts. For now it’s enough for me to think that you understand how important it is to choose the right DAW for you, don’t follow the advice of gurus but get an idea by trying to work with one software and then another. The main functions of DAWs are almost equivalent, find the one that best fits your creative workflow, it’s the only trick.
It is a legitimate question, in fact a computer today can be used to create a recording studio to create even complex works which until recently would have required the use of a real studio, equipped with gigantic mixers, multitrack recorders reels and every blessing tools.
However the response to this question is long, and therefore I will divide it into different parts.
introduction
The recording studio is a fundamental part of music production process, as it directly influences the quality of your final product, let’s say the record.
These studios each have a distinctive sound, influenced by available equipment and recording environments (it’s easy to imagine that having a large room to record in will produce a sound with unique natural reverb, for example).
Over time some of these studios have become legendary, for example the Abbey Road Studios or the Sarm Studio, used by very famous bands (Led Zeppelin, Beatles, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley tell you something?).
Furthermore, each of these studios had several legendary sound engineers, able to manage and create great works such as Atom Hearth Mother or The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and many other works that have made the history of modern music.
Thus the combination of studio equipment and sound engineer was a fundamental must for any artist who wanted to try their hand at making the fundamental album of their artistic career.
The studio itself was equipped with gigantic mixers, huge multitrack reel to reel tape recorders, walls of audio and effects equipment, miles of cables. The musicians and sound engineers communicated behind a large window, which divided the musician from the actual studio.
A legendary multitrack Otari MX 80 Tape Recorder
All of this equipment had one thing in common: they cost a fortune and to be able to afford to do a studio production you had to have a fat wallet (here come the legendary producer, a guy that have the ability to find the money needed for pay the studio).
Each instrument had to be recorded on a single track in order to be able to mix it with the rest of the instruments later, but the tape recorders and magnetic tapes of that era had physical limits, so the sound engineers had to resort to particular tricks such as bounce, transferring some tracks to a single one to free space on the tape. There was no copy/paste, and in the case surgical cuts of the tape were used, which was glued to the joint with adhesive tape. To record complex arrangements (think for example of those of the historical Pink Floyd) the life of the studio was not easy at all.
Life wasn’t easy even for aspiring musicians: to spread and sell your work you needed at least a recorder, and a Revox or a Teac cost a kidney at the time. Billy Studer, the inventor, was very happy dude.
Then a miracle happened: in the early 1980s Tascam’ produced a small integrated portable studio, called Portastudio, mixer and 4-track recorder on the then common cassette tapes. Incredible.
The recording quality was certainly not that of a studio, the cassettes were certainly not equivalent in frequency response to those of an Ampex tape, but who cares! For an aspiring musician it was an epic step forward. Or at least for me it was
The home-recording wave, which allowed musicians to cheaply record and produce music at home was started,and is cited as one of the most significant innovations in music production technology.
I was the lucky owner of a Portastudio, and enjoyed it very much. However, for now we are talking about analog sound on tape recorders, but the first computers for music are arriving, which record digitally.
Atari 1040 ST come in 1985, and the game change again. Its MIDI ports and VST technology will change the way music is produced forever. But this is the next episode.
Before go at Part 2, please look the following video, he explain a lot on recording process on a computer. Next step we need to talk about weird stuff like MIDI, VSTs and DAWs, so follow the given links to start understanding what they are.
We don’t want to be amateurs who just push the button, do we?
Based on texts taken from the book “Akashic Diaries – Detroit Degree Zero and Other Crisis Writings” (published by Europia Productions at the end of April 2023, in e-book and paper format) commissioned to Biba Sheikh at the start of the Covid 19 lockdown in April 2020 (in the framework of the “No Lockdown Art” initiative initiated by Transcultures – Belgium and the European Pepinieres of Creation), Paradise Now (here in close collaboration with the sound architect Didié Nietzsche aka A LIMB) asked the author/performer to send him texts read at her home near Detroit, Michigan.
From these raw recordings, these sonopoetic and cinematic pieces have been developed, letting the text’s meaning and musicality unfold. Paradise Now and didié Nietzsche (aka A LIMB) sended sounds to each other by the Internet to gradually build this album of sonopoetic correspondence before being able to work a few days in face-to-face residency at the Transonic Lab/Transcultures (Belgium) in 2022 and early 2023.
“Akashic Diaries”, which is part of a hybrid publication project, is as much an invitation to reading as to engaged listening, and also its autonomy.
This album will soon be played in Second Life by Paradise Now and A LIMB. More information soon!
Listen the album on Bancamp: https://transonic-records.bandcamp.com/album/akashic-diaries
Music is present in any SL event, and there are many categories of musicians: DJs, cover bands, singers, instrumentalists, and anyone who uses music as a form of entertainment.
Among all these types of musicians, there is one in particular that fascinates me: who compose and play their own music. In general these are really passionate people, who over time have built their own personal studio by spending time and money in this passion and they also use SL to play their own music. I think it’s easy to see the difference between this type of musician and all the others: what you hear is a performance built on one’s sensitivity and skill, and the result is presented in public. A very delicate relationship.
The Hexagons is a place dedicated to those who produce and play their own music, a catalogue of musicians who produce or have produced their own music in Second Life. In the installation there are frames with the images of these musicians: a click on the frame will give you a folder containing the image and a text with all the information about the selected artist.
The Hexagons also has a stage on the roof where occasionally events can be organised.
Why all those stairs? Well any composer does scales all day, major, minor, pentatonic, blues. mixolydian, eolian, so on and so forth.
Do I like Escher? Yes, I like his work but in this case the stairs are practicable and you can also walk them upside down.
The current artists are certainly not all those present in SL, for now they are only those I know personally. So if you are a musician who produces your own music and plays it in SL, send me a photo of you and a notecard with your information, I will be happy to add a new frame to the directory.
